During our Peace Corps training, I lived with a host family, near the train station. I would walk with a friend to the college where we took language and culture lessons. We followed a train track as we cut across the city. We shared a love of movies and passed the time by quoting or reenacting our favorite scenes. Once, passing through a sparse winter vegetable market, he looked at me, smiled, and said, “This might be the garden spot of the whole country! People may travel hundreds of miles just to get to this spot where we’re standing now!” I knew the movie—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—but could not remember the end of the quote. I wanted to participate, so I thought of another line I knew, from earlier in the movie. “Can’t swim? Hell, the fall will probably kill you!”
That spring—our fifth year together, the second of our marriage, our last in Miami—hurricane season arrived early. It brought six storms between April and November. After the first storm, I stood on the screened-in lanai. The late-day heat had given way to mosquitoes and swamp bugs. We had spent all day and night in the same small room. I didn’t really know why I was angry with Katie. It was evening in Miami, and it would rain again, all night, warm still. I heard the whir of the air-conditioner drying out the room. Outside, the bay receded for the night under docks and back into the mangrove. Katie was tired and wanted to sleep, but I insisted we stay awake. We should end the fight, I said, and not go to bed angry. What more was there to say? We were resigned and wary. We could no longer articulate simple points, the cause of our anger, and how we might resolve it. We climbed into bed, finally, and Katie fell asleep quickly, and while I insisted I was too angry to sleep, soon I slept, too.
I woke in the middle of the night, and the anger was gone, replaced with shame and guilt and the vague hope that it might all have been a dream, that something spectacular and outside of myself could magically fix things. No, I told myself, I should be stubborn. We were making a precedent, and I needed to hold my ground that next morning. It would matter who first apologized. Later, a friend would say it very simply: either be happy or be right. What’s the point of being happy, I said, if I’m not right?
That night I rolled into Katie, and, half asleep, she pulled me close. We slept like that a while. When we woke, the room, the city, even our marriage were exactly as we had left them. Stone faced, we stared across the bed a while at each other.
Now, Katie said, here is the problem with being good at words.
Cognitive Bandwidth
The occasion for my arrival in Indiana, Katie’s death, yielded to the everyday affections of family life. However provisional, I felt I belonged there. I liked it.
We drove across town to picnics and amusement parks; walked to Friday-night dinners at neighbors’ houses to watch movies and play board games; took our time at the franchise coffee shop, the Goodwill store, and the ice cream parlor, even the sporting goods outlet, where the kids bought me an olive zip-up sweater for Christmas. At home we made pizzas, pancakes, cookies, and tacos. We played guitars in the living room. We watched television in the family room. We put our feet on the sofa, our heads on the floor, and played a new game, Upside-Down Ball. We drove to the Broad Ripple deli counter with the good fries, to the Indianapolis Museum of Art to see the original Hiroshige prints, to parking lots near the Riverfront walking paths or the orchestra hall across the street from the city’s memorial fountain lit blue for football season and red for the basketball tournament.
I looked for my life with Katie in these new routines. In an alternate reality, dim with recognition, we still sat on that balcony overlooking Bucharest, talking about work and making plans for a future that would never bring us here. That year, even our life, seemed less and less certain. I sat in my room at night looking on Google Maps to remember the order of the city’s monuments along my walk across the city to Katie’s office: through the embassy district, past Revolution Square, then down along Unirii. I pointed the cursor at our apartment building and cropped the space around it until the screen would not magnify. The pixels went blank with warnings about restrictions.
All spring I biked the Monon Trail to the city limits. I stopped for coffee at the underpass by the public library. I sat on the lawn, in the midday sun, watching strangers and reading my book. After therapy sessions I biked a stretch through the wealthiest neighborhoods in Indianapolis, making a long and inevitable loop toward the state highway. It was an election year. Candidates conceded races and endorsed rivals. I followed the minutiae of each primary, cheering underdogs on both sides. I had no workweek, really, only an obligation to show up to teach business writing at the university twice a week. Those afternoons I did not teach, I sometimes met Ed for lunch. More often, I stayed home and made sandwiches with Beth, catching up on our days, books, music, neighbors, friends. When she returned to her home office, I disappeared into my room to write or to grab a jacket for another long walk.
I see myself there: resigned, confused, scared, and uncertain. And yet, in many ways, I am happy to feel so loved. A first glance shows my room, filled with the markers of grief and sorrow, narrow from window to door, austere, thinly walled. A room to which I retreat to grieve but also to prepare some public version of myself. More and more, I am anxious to engage the world. There are gadgets and trinkets on the shelves, workout clothes in the dresser, correspondence stacked and opened on the desk. Even in this temporary space, under exceptional circumstances, there is some uncertainty about the hermetic life. I have never lived in a house where I might linger in a separate room for hours without consequence or explanation. When the door is closed, I am uneasily alone.
More often, I leave the door open. I sit at my desk until one of my nieces comes down the hall to visit the cat, or to talk about her day, or to make fun of my facial hair. She sits a while in the plush chair by the window, waiting patiently for my attention. When I know I am being watched, I cannot take myself too seriously. I learn the names of friends and the limits of teasing. Not boys; teachers and neighbors are fair game. New music is downloaded and burned onto discs slipped under doors; movies are rented and watched and left by the television; board games and conversations continue on the dining room table for days. This familiarity, this winning closeness, cannot be a consolation for Katie’s death, and yet, I cannot imagine how I might otherwise enjoy it so much. I am learning the rituals of a family that loves me. The place I hold in it for Katie becomes my own.
Sometimes I return to the house early from a neighborhood party, before dinner, out the side door from a backyard pool, where some half-finished movie is projected on the wall. Walking up the drive, I see the outline of my cats in the low windows off the garage, under dark trees. Maybe an airplane or two passes overhead, reflecting back the city’s lights. And there I am: walking past the mailboxes, up the drive, and through the front door to make a sandwich in the kitchen, sitting down in the living room to watch television by myself on a Saturday evening. A straggling procession of eventual arrivers follows at a distance. I can hear them coming down the short cul-de-sac. I am not alone in the big house for too long.
Weddings and funerals, Beth says, bring out the worst in families.
We are sitting in the kitchen on a Thursday afternoon in September, talking about Katie’s funeral and the year between her father Wylie’s death and Katie’s funeral. I had missed the memorial service for Wylie, and though Beth does not hold a grudge, I feel keenly in the months after Katie’s death my tenuous absence. Yes, the timing was awful; money was tight; I was leaving to meet Katie in Romania for a few weeks with no sense of any job that might follow—all of this is true—but the real fault of my absence was a certain tone-deafness to the pain of a family member, my close friend, who lived far enough away I might reasonably comfort her in person, as I had when we visited that spring, at Beth’s suggestion, to spend a few afternoons with her father after his move to hospice care.
I appreciated that you sent flowers, Beth says. Some people didn’t even do that.
Katie and I had l
iked Wyle. He was a charismatic, generous man. He had a terrific skill for entertaining his grandchildren all day, then dropping them off at the house before dinner with sugar highs and full diapers. In his study he kept a display of American West tchotchkes that, after his death, sold at auction for a lot of money. Leather-bound encyclopedias with gold lettering and cream-stock paper lined the wall that faced the Sacajawea coins. Sacajawea, who guided the map makers west, then either died with her white husband of an unknown illness in St. Louis or disappeared across the Great Plains and lived alone for another sixty years.
Ed told his family that if they couldn’t make it, it was okay.
Katie liked to say that Beth had married a hard man to love, and maybe I saw it more clearly that year, up close, living in his house. The terms of his affection were often singular, but winnowing. It was easy to follow Ed. It was hard sometimes to do much else. And this was the basis of Ed’s growing frustration with his family: no one wanted to spend as much time outdoors on the weekend as he did; or exercise as frequently after work; or idealize the ascetic life, unplugged from the technology and waste of his long workday, in which he often found satisfaction by escaping to rural Kentucky, the rock-climbing gym, the church, or the guitar-filled basement, training one season for endurance sports and watching adventure television through the next. Ed needed exception from his life. He readied himself to prove on any mountain his fitness. Perhaps he believed, after Katie’s death, that it could make his family safe. But his family wanted only to stay inside, watching screens, refusing nature, and practicing, from a great distance, his own vigilance.
But it wasn’t okay! Isn’t having a big group around you after a death what really helps?
One Christmas, visiting from Miami, while Katie was still asleep, Beth and I drove from Judy’s house to the megamall with her daughters, to buy a coffee and a New York Times. It was 6:00, maybe 6:30 a.m. We had all slept on air mattresses in the living room, at least until the air mattresses had deflated; between trying to run the pump and settle ourselves onto sofa cushions, we had given up on sleep, finally, a little before dawn. We drove through town, out to the interstate. Really, we didn’t expect any part of the mall to be open. The skeleton crew of baristas at the franchise coffee shop were blasting punk rock and dancing with each other. They had not expected us either. They comped our drinks. We wished each other a Merry Christmas. We left a big tip and then drove back to the house to open presents.
Planning Katie’s services, talking to neighbors, visiting the church, cooking meals, watching all the kids. I like being helpful.
Hadn’t I always loved escaping into the early-morning winter and driving in circles through the empty streets? Exurban Illinois was a bleak place, and being out alone made it feel like breaking some minor rule. It didn’t matter I was out. It was only a matter of time before I returned.
It’s nice not to only be the enemy who has stolen away the eldest son to my home in Indiana.
There was no sequence, no continuity around which Ed’s affection might organize his family now. It was smaller after Katie’s death. Its fragmented, vulnerable life might be the new norm, and I felt empathy for Ed’s frustrations at having to acknowledge it. I listened, nodded, and hoped his contentions, however argued over, would eventually clear away. I watched them accumulate, until it seemed I could measure two broad, unequal portions: before Katie’s death and after it.
How was that not my fault, too?
I’m pretty sure that, before too long, I’ll be the enemy again.
Ed came to hear in the tone of his family’s voices a talking back he did not like. He moped and stewed. The kids ignored it.
Fights became terrific and did not begin or end. They happened behind closed doors and out of earshot. The sudden absence of adult voices was striking, the eventual emergence from rooms and the continuation of routines uncomfortable. I felt guilty, by proxy. I hated conflict. I wanted everyone to stay fixed in some sense of themselves while I focused on grieving for Katie. Instead, I saw myself no fixed center for all of it. Ed believed there was plotting against him, a deep and persistent rejection of his values conditioned by a wife who brainwashed the children to enable the persistent agreeability of his ex-brother-in-law. Beth, on the other hand, hedged Ed’s wildest ambitions of nature, deliberately perpetuating a routine—soccer practices, orchestra lessons, sleepovers, breakfast—that was all surfaces.
For a while, I smiled and tried to take everyone’s side. I had no idea how much television Beth let the kids watch while Ed was at work. I agreed with Ed it would be fun to spend more time in nature as a family.
The night Ed made homemade organic cheese during an episode of American Idol, I went back and forth between the kitchen and the family room, cheering all sides. Then, I thought, This is ridiculous. What did I care who ignored whom and for what reasons? I watched American Idol. I hated cheese. The kids were so happy to see one singer go home from the competition, while the other moved forward to the next round. When Ed’s back went out and he disappeared up the stairs, I did not get up from the sofa.
Everyone tried to take the self-cure. Ed went to Kentucky at a moment’s notice or stayed late at night in the gym at the strip mall. Beth spent more time out of the house during the day and with the kids in the evening. She started working part-time in an office.
I was familiar now and less exotic. My routines in the house grated: coffee grounds down the disposal, parking my car at certain inconvenient angles to the garage, my cats, a space heater forgotten and left on in the room all afternoon.
I could say it another, less careful way. Perhaps I did not want to love everyone equally after Katie’s death. Maybe I no longer saw an obligation to encompass the complicated fidelities of other lives. It seemed that, whenever I finally left, two realities would commence, both independent of me: the continuing life of Ed’s family and the individual lives it contained. I understood I might become the scapegoat for certain alliances. I was implicated for both my arrival into a family and my departure from it. The fact of my leaving gave Ed an ample rehearsal for his own departures. A few months before the divorce, over tea, Katie’s grandmother asked whether Beth was going to leave Indiana with me.
Let me revisit that failure again and hope to revive some connection between Ed and Katie, in order to better articulate my own complicated affection.
A blizzard shuts down the city. We are all home for days on end. Ed is eager to watch a video from college, in which he narrates a ski trip with a handheld camcorder. On a snowed-in road, in a used car, Ed points the camera at himself, then at four friends. Their faces are lean and dark with stubble, hidden behind sunglasses. Each time the camera turns back to Ed, it takes a moment to recognize him. His voice is higher pitched in his youth. His tone is lighter. His words run in phrases packed with a skier’s jargon I cannot follow. At one point the driver pulls over to the side of the road, to wait out the worst of the storm. The video stops and starts. Ed checks in periodically over the course of an afternoon to update their waiting.
Snow cakes the windshield in the video. Snow is hedge deep outside the window in Indianapolis. We are housebound and watching television, and I am watching a video with Ed and laughing when he laughs, because I like to see him so happy. But I cannot make his enthusiasm my own. I don’t ski. I don’t know Ed’s friends or their jokes. I don’t like mountains or wilderness, and I resent the danger he survives. It reminds me of Katie, and I think it would break Ed’s heart to point out something so obvious. And yet, to say any of that to Ed would only ruin his enjoyment and shift the focus back to me, would only shock him from his own nostalgic and safe reverie back into a world we inhabit together because of Katie’s death.
Ed runs the video a second time, and this time through I remember which parts make him happiest. I preempt his own laughs, repeating some of his narration. There is the effect of banter. It takes a great effort not to commence my own darkly ironic commentary. I wait for Ed and his friends to sur
vive and continue their adventure. I know they will survive because I am sitting with Ed in his living room, watching his video.
I think of another movie from my childhood, in which two men debate the color of the apple on the Tree of Knowledge. What does it matter whether Eve passes to Adam a red, green, or gold apple? The apple is a beginning, a hinge from which follows everything: the Fall of Man, first sin, Cain and Abel, the Eve of Resurrection. It is motionless, ripe, filled with potential. To linger too long on the apple is to invest it with the worst kind of melodrama, to make the inevitability a kind of climax at which no real conflict is resolved. Only failure and postscript can follow.
I laugh with Ed because he is happy, but I am not happy. I am furious, sad, and scared. I feel trapped in a joke I don’t know how to continue. I do not understand it. I want the feeling of our closeness, rather than the acknowledgment and honesty that should probably follow it. This is my shortcoming and nervousness: my eagerness to get along. To say I see Katie anywhere in the video is to ruin his nostalgia and to impose on his joy the awkward shapes of grief and caution. My shapes. Ed does not look for them in the video. He sees only his happy, former self in a world where both his brother and Katie are still alive and far away, where his wife still seems to want to spend time alone with him, where she is still the girl who once loved him so eagerly she followed him everywhere. Everything was changing now. In the video whoever left his mountain continued a life in Indiana that had not yet become a family closed into separate rooms of a house, safely watching a different storm on television, waiting out the worst of winter.
Young Widower Page 14